Leonhardt : Yes, College is Worth It

David Leonhardt doesn’t buy any of the sentiments floating around that college degrees may not be worth the debt one must incur to attain them these days, and his response (written in reaction to this post on The Choice) is that this idea “flies in the face of an overwhelming amount of evidence”:

In fact, the gap between the pay of college graduates and everyone else has reached an all-time high, Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows. That’s evidence of an undersupply of college graduates. If more people were graduating from college, then college graduates would not command a wage premium relative to everyone else. If more people were graduating from college, as the economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz explained in an important recent book, income inequality would not be nearly as high as it is.

Jesse Singal is a former opinion writer for The Boston Globe and former web editor of the Washington Monthly. He is currently a master's student at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Policy. Follow him on Twitter at @jessesingal.